You could do the Hurricane Rita Houston evacuation. ...It was a titanic 💩 show, and quite possibly the world's largest traffic jam. Yes, people died. (It was a month after Katrina, so I think the poor government response in New Orleans had a lot of us spooked.)
This is what people mean when they say that safety regulations are written in blood. Rest in peace all the poor souls who died that day or who survived but were mentally scarred for the rest of their lives.
It is absolutely mind boggling that the owners were acquitted, continued the same practices that lead to the disaster, were caught twice more at least, but nobody ever reopened the case to actually punish them besides taking some "pocket change"
@@kumaahito3927 It's actually run of the mill ordinary thing. Rich people have more political power, and political power can and will distort justice. Exactly as happened here. I'm sure the businessmen had political connections too, which probably distorted things even further. This is how human societies in general function. Do not expect justice. Political power is the only real arbiter of who gets punished and who gets to walk free from even the worst crimes.
@@PlainlyDifficult yeah. the station nightclub fire is another example that destroys me. learning about these incidents did make me a more vigilant person at least, because now i always check where all the exits near me are in a building i’m in.
It was pretty amazing how NYU students from the building next-door managed to save several people by extending a ladder between the windows for workers to crawl over.
That happened at the Iroquois Theater Fire in Chicago as well; students from Northwestern University managed to bridge Couch Place and rescued several people before the plank bridge gave way.
It's worth noting that similar incidents are still happening in the textile industry. Another great disaster to look at is the Dhaka garment factory collapse. Once I started reading about current conditions in most garment factories, I stopped buying fast fashion and instead focused on buying quality, ethically made clothing or thrifting clothes. (I also understand that this isn't a clear cut issue and many people can only afford fast fashion clothing, which delves more into how horribly people in general are paid.)
The Rana Plaza collapse was one of the most disgraceful, disgusting things to befall workers in the modern age - what shocks but doesn't surprise me is that even high value goods involve the abuse of the poor in some unseen area of the world. Luxury teas in the UK still come from pickers that aren't given a bare minimum of PPE to protect from pesticides (for very little cost!). Foxconn is a good read if your not feeling miserable enough😬
I agree mostly, but Im a broke student and I dont wear any fast fashion. It aint cheap at all. I got myself some Levis for 20-30$ a piece back in 2008 (!) and I still wear them. I got a few more last year, but thats it. If you wear clothes until they are no longer wearable, quality is 100x cheaper than Shein or other fast fashion sh*t.
Ayyyy, nice to see another video. Feels weird to be so happy to see a notification that just means I'll learn about people dying due to (usually) someone else's negligence.
@@PlainlyDifficult yeah and also this video is pretty interesting cause here in the u.s. I learned about this topic in english class of all places and some of the stories written about inside point of view by the survivors is incredible
Don't look at it that way. The more we know about the history the better. When I was in architecture school we had to learn about egress. They used the Club/Studio Fire disaster as an example of bad design and how another fire 50 years prior changed law to have a 1 hour fire wall between building units. The studio/club fire was the worst for me. People got trampled and it was one door because they locked the others. No sprinkler system and the fire killed alot of people in a small space. I will always remember it and ever since I can always point out 2 or more exits in a building. Even parking lots to big shopping centers have a minimum of 2 exits to the parking lot. When traffic is heavy at the lights and entrances I circle around behind the building where delivery trucks go and find the back up exits 18 wheelers take. It saves time and makes things quick during the holidays. This Christmas I was leaving walmart and no one and I mean no one was on the back exits. The 2 eentrance/exits at the front with lights had about 60 cars each trying to leave. I circled around and stopped for 3 seconds at the stop sign and I was on the main road. Beat all the traffic. Said that to say I see building entrances and exits difference. I look for the best and least travel way to exit due to panic and people rushing for main exits.
@@cmasterson "...walmart" Ignoring how you pay up front, then move through to the back, pass through the Employees-Only stock area and leave, Walmart products are made in overseas factories like this one.
With the failures of those who were in charge of many of these places leading to disaster, it stands to reason these videos will be the only way we learn how to not do it again. In a kind of dark irony, these vids save lives. But most importantly we get the weekly weather report in London U.K.
If you visit any store in America now you might notice a sign or letters above the doors of a business that say “this door to remain unlocked during business hours” and I believe the triangle fire was the reason for that legislation
Yeah every business with a certain amount of allowance for occupancy has to have a certain amount of usable exits during operation for situations like this. It really came into play when I did my Fire Code training in Fire Academy. It was important for us to know how many exits to expect, roughly, and their general placements. People would get mad if their building wasn't up to code like it's our fault somehow. All I could think was "if a fire ever broke out here, your ass would be grass and OSHA is gonna have the weed whacker" It's ridiculous how little some people care about basic fire safety.
I’ve been fascinated by this disaster ever since I attended NYU and realized (from the plaque on the building) that I was attending class in the very building in which it took place. Thanks for giving it your trademark compassionate, yet matter-of-fact treatment!
Oh wow. So did NYU buy the lot the land was on, knock down the old building, and then build their own in its place, or did they literally just renovate the old Shirtwaist factory building? It's always strange when a building has an old, dark history like that.
@@mcnultyssobercompanion6372 It's still the same building!! Triangle owned the 8-10th floors, and after everything was fixed after the fire, NYU bought the 8th floor in 1916. NYU later bought the whole building
@@mcnultyssobercompanion6372 The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which doesn't provide any actual legal protection, but does mean there would probably be a lengthy court battle waged by preservationists if any owner tried to demolish it.
@@mcnultyssobercompanion6372 The building was, indeed, fireproof. Unfortunately, everything else *in* the building was not. NYU has owned land around Washington Square Park since right after it was founded in the 1830s-indeed, some NYU Law students attending a Saturday study session next door rescued some of the fire victims by stretching some ladders across the gap between the roofs of the buildings.
The Ash Building is still standing and in use. It’s owned by NYU. The top three floors are cut up into laboratory spaces. That’s what “fireproof” meant then: building would suffer no structural damage and could be put back in use as soon as the wreckage and bodies were cleared out.
That is great that the buildings were made they way, as they should be made safely and fireproof construction also often contains the fire so that it doesn't spread to the next building and the next. What is not ok is using that excuse to think "Oh these workers I exploit and abuse will be just fine locked in for the workday so that they don't steal a fabric scrap to patch up their child's school outfit or just as bad, take a break! The buildings fireproof so why should I worry about a fire?" Evil, evil and greedy...
As a former Forensic Architecture Technician, part of our duty was check for trip hazards & fire safety. One of the most common problems were stairwells in high rise bldngs not having adequate size/layout, and inconsistency of stairs. X amount of people are supposed to be able to dump out of a building in X time. Step /tread/height tolerance has to be within 1/16” of each other (can’t remember the exact number) but even being an 1/8” off from one step to another can subconsciously mess you up and you can trip. Slopes of stairs have to be within a certain range too.- if too steep, people are more likely to fall. Too shallow and it slows people down too much. The last thing is the size of the landings, exit door, and door swing. Landings have to allow for clumps of people to gather and get out. We developed a tool called the stairometer( I wish we patented it) -we would lock down the profile in a template of the staircase per the arch plans or per the building code at the time of construction. We would lay it on every step and measure how far off if any the stair was out of spec. I learned a lot on that job!
The step measurement thing explains a few things in my life involving old buildings and haunted/curses stairs. And all of the facts are just cool in general.
This reminds me of a video someone made about some random step on a staircase up from a subway station in NYC, if I remember correctly. The step was not visually perceivable as different, but this person had measured the discrepancy compared to the others, and recorded a compilation of people tripping on that EXACT step! I don't have any source for this, just a vague memory of video I watched years ago.
@@TheMechanic554 add a riser of 1/8 of an inch to the other stairs. May have to replace some carpet, if the stairwell had any, but definitely easier than complete reno.
another bad thing with these sewing factories were the wooden floors were soaked with oil from the sewing machines, the fuzz from the material, and other things from the handing and processing of clothing items. i worked in many sewing factories doing electrical work in the city i live in, reading, Pa. we used to be a big area for sewing factories. and we had some that caught fire and man did they go up fast and burn down in no time. and i can tell you crawling around those places the layers of dust, fuzz, oily goop that was left behind in the crawl spaces and up in the beams
I swear... When you first get started with any kind of powered equipment for fabric or textiles, like a sewing machine or automatic knitter, it's ASTOUNDING how much fuzzy, dusty, crap they seem to magically attract!!! You get your first sewing machine, be it a "normal" or a "surger" and you learn that intricate clean-out procedure from the manual... AND then a new one from the technician to help you clean, oil, and maintain on your own between visits... AND then EVERY single time you turn your head there's something else catching lint... some place else where something's dragging... and you're getting inventive with an air-compressor because you just can't afford keyboard cleaner anymore... I honestly don't know how they'd handle it in the sewing factories... I'd be out of my mind in a week! ;o)
I remember back in highschool I was assigned to do a project explaining the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. It made me anxious about going in buildings that could have potential fire hazards in them for about a year. Truly an awful situation where the main culprit was corporate greed wanting to minimize costs and maximize profits, no matter the cost of human lives.
If its corporate its always greedy. Corpos are devoid of humanity and would burn you and your family alive to make a buck. This is why we need more regulation with teeth and lengthy jail times.
Read up on the Imperial Food Products plant in Hamlet, North Carolina. Faulty sprinklers and exits chained shut led to twenty-five deaths eighty years after the triangle fire.
There's a beautiful, heart-twistingly realistic book I read as a kid. It's a historical fiction novel iirc, called "Ashes of Roses" by M.J. Auch. It focused on both the brutal treatment faced by many Irish immigrants entering from Ellis Island during the early 1900s, and more specifically, it presents this exact disaster and the people it affected. The whole book is completely thrilling from cover to cover.
@@fever4174 of course not! 🤣 but hey, if they're going to behave like knuckleheads in the comment section of a education-based TH-cam channel, let them. I'm not the one that looks ridiculous! (Well, perhaps I do look a bit ridiculous. The pan flag has always been fairly bright and gaudy, buuut it also draws the eye, so... 😅)
I live in New England in a relatively small town. I volunteer for my local fire department and we have a regional Fire Academy. This specific incident is still studied today. Several obvious things are covered: don't lock escape routes, have plenty of fire extinguishers, etc. One thing that is obvious but might not seem it from an abstract view is DO NOT BUILD HIGHER THAN YOUR TALLEST LADDER.
Grenfell tower is a case in point. Although after that disaster, some bright spark wanted to build a 51 storey residential block of flats not far away from where that occured. But only wanted 1 set of staircases in order to maximise profits. Yeah that nearly got the go ahead if it wasn't for The Guardian (a UK newspaper) finding out and splashing it all over their front pages.
I first heard about this story from my grandfather, who was both the Deputy Chief of our local fire department, and also a self-taught tailor. Because I loved his stories, I knew right away when he described the building what was going to happen...
I remember reading about this in a firefighter book when I was in 5th grade. What I remember the most is the pictures in the book of the worker’s bodies on the sidewalk after jumping
@@sparrow166 I don’t necessarily think the book was meant for 5th graders but I read it in 5th grade. I actually have that very book in my room to this day
I am in construction here in NYC.. I've worked on projects at NYU which is directly across the street and every time I see this building I get chills after learning about this catastrophe in school as a kid...
Mike, I'm looking to get away from where I am currently, as I'm just not happy. Could you point me in the right direction to get a job in NYC? I love the city, especially being from the sticks of nowhere.
A truly horrific and tragic disaster, with an infuriating aftermath to boot. I work in textiles myself, and in this day and age it can be easy to forget that someone had to fight for these working conditions. I hope the lives that were lost this day found their peace
I'd love to see you do a video on Our Lady of the Angels school fire. That tragedy struck everyone in the area. Even my father who was a child at the time lost a cousin to the blaze.
Here in Mexico the same happened on the 1985 quake, a lot of textile workers died because their building catches fire and all doors were locked from outside with a big chain, my grandma worked nearby and saw much of what happened.
There was an even worse fire in NYC just seven years before the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, onboard the steamboat General Slocum. 1021 people died, mostly women and children going on a day trip. There were abysmal safety standards on the boat: for example, the life jackets hadn’t been replaced in thirteen years and instead of keeping people afloat, they absorbed water and dragged their wearers down.
Also, the fire hoses on board were dry rotted and the life boats were either chained or bolted down - I don't remember which - effectively making them decorations.
Any time an industry is allowed to self regulate, this is the outcome. Safety regulations are written in blood, and labor laws are no different. The fact that so many people are so vocal about wanting to loosen up regulations that are there to keep them from becoming a statistic is beyond any level of reason.
My grandfather was a fireman. He was a little kid when the Triangle fire happened, but he always remberd it. That and the 1954 Cleavland school fire really made him be concerned about fire safety
this one was especially disturbing and triggering, owners didn't get any real punishment and it's pretty much how the system still works when it comes to the rich
If the penalty for violating safety regulations is less than the cost of following the regulations, the company owners won't even pretend to care about workers' safety. 'Murica.
If I remember correctly the doors opened in to the rooms, not outwards. So even if the doors were unlocked, panicked people mobbing to the doors would make them quite difficult to open. This is why doors open outwards (path of exit)
Excellent summary of this horrible event. Fabric scraps and textile dust fed the initial fire, but the heavy wooden floors turned it into a raging inferno. For years, oil from the machinery had soaked into the wood. Once the floors began to burn, the oil acted as an accelerant to make this hell even more hellish.
I had read about this tragedy before, but I never realized that the owners kept up their bad practices after the fire. I am at a loss for words. That is a combination of greed and stupidity that boggles the mind.
I imagine the dead and their families would have appreciated your referring to the event as a industrial disaster rather than an industrial accident. The only efforts to preserve the lives of the workers were those that could be sloughed off to the women themselves - the restriction on smoking.
I read a book as a kid about the lives of a few (real) women who were caught and died in the fire. It was genuinely one of the most terrifying and horrible things I’d ever read- it included the graphic ways in which workers died, I could hardly believe it was real and how cruel it all was. Brutal but effective introduction to worker’s rights as a child.
This is interesting. It also reminds me of what my history teacher would do. He would open and close the door and ask what was important about it. He would then talk about that the reason the door opened outwards was because in the day doors opened in ward and in factories if there was a fire people would run to the door to escape. Since they were all piling on a door that opened inward no one could open the door. People would die from being trampled on and trapped to be consumed by the fire. He would always use this example when ever we talked about the industrial revolution and when he tried to explain why studying history is important. That even the tiniest things such as a way we open doors is important
Ive got a Good subject to think about. Its not about Dams but about a chemical dissaster in the netherlands. Its called: the fire at the Moerdijk at the 5th of january 2011. It is a chemical prossesion plant that caught fire and almost troched a square kilometer on fire.
Good one. also totally preventable and the result of not enforcing the rules. Somehow the profit of private company's is more important than public safety, and not destroying the environment.
My only complaint with this video is as an American I think the historical ranking of 8 is wrong; it should be a 10. This is a before triangle/after triangle inflection moment in the US in regards to workers rights, occupational health and safety legislation, labor union growth, fire codes, generalized building codes, the publics views on immigrants as people, etc. To this day it has a not insignificant amount of space devoted to it in our high school history books.
If you think a fire in one building most people have never even heard about deserves a historical 10 you've never heard of real 10s like the Great Chicago fire or even worse the Iroquois Theater fire.
@@vertyisprobablydead Going to have to disagree with you. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire is something that's taught in a lot of schools here in the U.S.
I’d give it a 10 on the Legacy because of Frances Perkins. If you don’t know who she is and her connection to the tragic event, you need to look her up. The TSW fire and FP changed American History and US Labor Laws forever. Additionally, the movie Dirty Dancing pays homage to FP, the first woman in the Cabinet…Baby’s real name was Frances.
@@vertyisprobablydead while not discounting the human cost of the two fires you mentioned, they did not influence US labor standards the way Triangle did. given that most if not all US labor safety laws can be linked in one way or another to this one fire - given that it was the first to get the political momentum needed to start the conversation - it deserves a 10. OSHA exists today because of this fire
Climate Town mentioned this in his fast fashion video, it's just so depressing that they got caught locking the doors AGAIN. Shows just how important labour laws and workers' rights are.
I remember learning about this way back in middle school. It wasn't until years later when I realized the absolute severity of lack of safety standards through out the industrial age between the 1700's to even today. We can joke about how OSHA is always up someone ass about something that isn't up to standard, but after witnessing injuries that fully could have been avoided, you start to realize that OSHA is absolute bare minimum in safety procedures. It's unfortunate that in order to actually start following safety procedures, people have to die first. Even after people die, it's up to companies to decide whether they'll spend the $5k out of the millions they make to do safety training. Common sense starts with the individual, but gets you fired by the company who tells you to disregard safety for profit.
Im diagnosed with OCD and I want to thank you for the fundraiser. It’s difficult to live with and difficult to talk about because of how stigmatized it is
I got a chapter of this in Jr.High schooling but it focused on ... other things.. Like the machinery the workers used and the locked emergency exits and the kinds of things they made with the machinery and the prices of their materials but not much else.-- Knowing how your channel handles things though, I'm excited for your more 'study the blackbox' approach :D
Sadly this is still a thing in parts of the world. 2012 Dhaka garment factory is a case in point. Locked doors, poor working conditions, insane hours, low paid, mostly young females and children. The 2021 fires in Pakistan (Lahore and Karachi ) with similar conditions and insane death tolls. There was even one in 2021 (Rupganj, Bangladesh) - although it was a juice factory, not a garment one - no fire exits, illegal building etc As long as people want money over lives, these things will continue to happen.
Actually the correct procedure in a tornado is to find an interior space with no windows and ideally several walls between the outside and you on the lowest level possible. A basement is best. You do not go outside in a tornado if at all possible except to go into an underground storm shelter. There is too much flying debris that can spear and kill you. Failing an interior, move as far away from the exterior walls as possible. Also, get as low as possible so any flying debris hopefully will not hit you. I have on the edges of a few tornados and they more dangerous than many who have never been around them realize.
The only correction was the Amazon plant was a few hours away from me, in Edwardsville, Illinois. The Kentucky facility was a candle facility in Mayfield, Kentucky. Edwardsville was hit around 9pm I believe. The National Weather Service put all of southern Illinois under a severe thunderstorm and tornado watch around 5pm. The tornado warning I believe was issued around 10 minutes before it hit the facility. (I have friends that attend SIUE and family from there, this is what they had told me.) Severe thunderstorms are rare for this area in winter. And with the change in temperatures we had that day, plus the added danger of a nighttime storm - it was a recipe for disaster. We had known for at least 3 days prior that this storm would be horrific and it could produce horrifying storms. These businesses had time to prepare. They had time to run a safety drill and show people where the interior safe spaces were/time for workers to know if they felt safe working during a projected severe storm. (Also, Amazon workers said that they were not allowed phones on themselves, but some kept their phones on them in case of the worst. Amazon has claimed this is false, but I believe the workers.) I know several places in my hometown that closed early because they did not want their employees to drive through the the horrific winds. We somehow managed to miss the worst of it, but nearly everywhere around us got hit with tornado warnings or hail. I believe all of southern Illinois - where I am from and where Edwardsville is located - was put under a watch starting at 5pm. We had several days of forewarning for how bad the storm could be PLUS several hours under a tornado watch/severe storm watch. I see a lot of people in my area be complacent about tornadoes. "It hasn't happened here, so it can't happen here." And I think that is what the Amazon warehouse was thinking, so management put Christmas Rush profits over the safety of their workers. Since it "can't happen here." I apologize for length, but as someone who saw just how bad the storm was and knew for just how much prep we had for a severe storm - it angers me at how little Amazon cared. How it seemed like they had no sturdy storm shelter, despite Edwardsville being on the edge of tornado alley. (And those exterior walls did not look like they were made to withstand high winds.) Employees should not have been in that building when the storm hit. And they had several hours under a tornado watch to prepare for the worst, as they were projected to be hit by a horrible cell. but they did nothing and allowed the next shift to come in and work. I could understand why you wouldn't want to cover the December 10th storm, as it is still so soon and there are still so many unknowns. (On top of there being so many different tornadoes.) But I would highly suggest covering it at some point. It was such a horrible and rare winter thunderstorm. And so many people were either injured or killed because they put profit over lives.
@@washingtonradio the warehouse had a storm shelter but they were either told too late to get there in time (Amazon warehouses are massive and tornadoes travel at 100mph), or weren't told at all
I learned about this event from watching Warehouse 13. A doorknob from the factory was imbued with the fire from the event and would burn anyone that touched it.
I remember learning about this in middle school (grade 7 more specifically). We focused on the effects this situation had on regulations for buildings and played into more worker rights stuff. Stuff I remember is about how the factory basically had implemented a check in out system with the doors, and made them less fitable. Doors swung inside the room. This caused huge issues in the stairways, people couldn’t open the door because the panic just had many people just trying to get out by going towards the excit. When the fire had gotten so bad a number jumped from windows before the firemen had arrived with catching tarps. And even when they did most if not all that attempted jumping down did not make the fall. Also remember how the lower floor was the floor with the men on it and one likely being the one who unconsciously threw the cigarette butt into the scrap waist bin. And most the main facts included in the lovely video. It’s Truely a harrowing tragedy that although verry preventable did help with adding needed regulations.
It may be obscure to much of the rest of the world, but this disaster is still so epochal in the US that it's mentioned in, of all things, an episode of the web series _Freeman's Mind_ (a comedic narration of gameplay from _Half-Life,_ you can find it here on TH-cam). Freeman rants about it after running into a dead end at a locked door that looks like it should be an emergency exit.
Nothing changes, workers are still seen as a commodity and are abused by employers. It's why workers rights are so important, if you don't have them your employer will provide only the bare minumum.
Oh I remember this story, I also remember that the doors were locked were keep workers isolated to prevent any outside parties to come in and try to unionize workers.
The Triangle Shirtwaist case is one of the primary civil law (ie. non-criminal) cases we studied at law school. It’s really fundamental to our current work environments here in North America.
This building was no more than 5 blocks from where I grew up on 5th avenue and 10th street. The building seems to have been right on washington square park, where I spent my childhood. When I heard of this story i always thought it was in the lower east side where a lot of garment sweat shops were. As always, you produce awesome content.
My wife and I try to report to the local fire marshal safety hazards like blocked doors, and they just yawn at us. When you go grocery shopping, notice how often the doors are partially blocked with piles of goods for sale. Those plies will make the building harder to evacuate in an emergency because they usually make the breakaway fire exits more difficult or even impossible to open, or at best leave narrower spaces through which to escape. I wonder when we will get another catastrophe.
Ugh. It's just nightmare fuel. I can't think of many worse ways to die in a collective setting. It's just horrific. I can only imagine witnessing this unfold from the outside, just realizing that you're about to witness these workers realize there's no hope for them.
@@PlainlyDifficult I had never heard the arson angle before, but also... Yeah, that does seem like the kind of crap the people who ran that company would get up to
Hey, as someone who used to test between "Severe" and "Extreme" on the Yale-Brown scale for OCD and greatly benefitted from (EXPENSIVE AND INTENSIVE) combined CBT and ERP therapies, I think it's really cool that your channel is promoting an OCD charity. I did not know what I had for *years*, and in that time, my syndrome grew exponentially worse as it was left untreated and exacerbated by my ineffective coping mechanisms. It's one of the few mental illnesses where outcomes can be significantly improved upon with professional intervention yet, some 10 years after my treatment, I notice that most medical professionals -- and even some mental health professionals -- still have absolutely no idea how to handle it. It needs more public attention.
Sidenote for OCD-sufferers reading this: OCD can be trained into you through systematic psychological abuse during development. Your compulsions do not have to be externalized; that is, your compulsions might just be internalized self-reassurances, or you might even have a near-total absence of compulsions. The intervention has some pretty impressive success rates, particularly in comparison to other diagnoses, but I will not lie to you: Things will get worse (during treatment) before they get better (after treatment). You will want to quit the interventions; in fact, you will HATE the interventions... But truly, at least for me, they saved my life. I improved further over the course of the years following therapy because I maintained my progress through concentrated effort, and overall, it "re-wired" me into not having such a profound anxiety response to intrusive thoughts. When the anxiety surrounding the thoughts diminishes, the thoughts themselves become less frequent and less debilitating. People generally find that they improve even more after therapy than they did during the treatment.
This story highlights the importance of unions in the constant never-ending battle for worker's rights. We would still be working in conditions like these and worse in nearly all industries today if not for the brave union members sticking together to fight for better lives for everyone.
I got my first factory job as a 16 year old in Toronto in the late 1990s, and compared to now, the equipment we used was from the 50s and 60s, and incredibly dangerous, with a complete lack of any basic safety features, guards, or things to block you from losing hands or fingers. In the early 2000s they upgraded things, and never looked back - it's really weird to think that just 30 years ago things weren't anywhere near as safe as today, it's a lot more recent than you'd ever know.
At the time, I didn't think it was strange to be a kid running machinery, but now that I'm grown, I wonder why that was ever allowed - if you get injured at such a young age, you destroy the rest of your life -- before it even began. Weird they used to hire high school students, and weird our parents made us work like that.
Reminds me a lot of the Stardust Tragedy in Dublin in the 1980s. A nightclub with fire escapes, but they were all chained up. The building caught fire and many inside perished.
First learned about this from the Ralph Bakshi film American Pop. This is a truly heartbreaking part of history that has been mostly forgotten today. Thank you for this video!
Whenever someone says to you that "government and regulations ruins business and proper safety measures would be implemented anyway by companies even without oversight" remind them this episode.
I learned about this in the fourth grade in a small school on the west cost. And it still infuriates me to this day. Awesome video still feel you rated it low on your scale’s.
This was part of my school curriculum when I took American history in high school. The school would remove such events from the curriculum. Their reasoning being that young adults don't need to worry about the negligence of companies in the past. Even recent events were removed.
I think the most tragic part was people deciding 8 or 9 stories did not seem very high up and at that point jumping felt like the only option. You may die, but you may get lucky and live, and at that point, you will take any option. The fire did bring about many life safety codes we take for granted to this day but at an awful cost.
I unfortunately took the more grim approach and figured it was a choice of dying quickly by fall, or slowly by fire. That choice if all that seemed to be left seems that death by fall would be more pleasant.
The legacy of this is actually a 9 or 10: The 1911 Triangle Factory Fire is also the inciting incident that generated the federal law requiring all business doors leading to the exterior or escape avenues to remain unlocked during business hours, and to have said statement clearly posted on the door in question.
I worked briefly at a medical center for the garment worker's union. That fire was represented by art on the building. It should never be forgotten how greed killed those women. At least they lost their business. As a Christian, I can say they may fully regret their actions on the other side if the veil. It was an education on the value of out lives and the unions.
It never gets easier to here this one. I've been taught about it a couple times in school and watched a video or two on it. It's always heart breaking.
This story has stuck with me through the decades. It happened on my birthday and it makes me sad. These poor people had to make a decision to burn to death or jump. It was a mini scaled 9/11 in that regards.
For the historical legacy scale, I'd say it's 9 from an American perspective. Only because it's one of the few disasters that you can find in grade school history textbooks. Probably second only to the Chicago Fire in widespread knowledge. Speaking of the Chicago fire, would you ever consider a video on the Peshtigo Fire? Way more deadly, but it happened the same night as the Chicago fire, and the news didn't give a crap about rural America.
Another situation where having money bought escape from prosecution. It’s a sad reflection of our legal system back in the day- and today as well. It’s disgusting but folks still escape prosecution like this simply because they are wealthy, influential business people. Thankfully there are laws to help prevent the cruel treatment of workers in the US today.
Always love it when the people responsible for something this terrible normally gets released from all responsibility. Ah America, you are free to die in a fire while also being free from blame if you caused that fire.
The sad thing is, as dangerous and inherently unsafe as the factory was, people almost made it out. Cloth doesn't burn especially toxic so there was time to escape, almost everyone on the 8th floor(1 of 3 of the Factory owned section) where the fire started escaped(only one death), mostly by the standard staircase. Everyone on the 10th floor where the offices were located also survived as they got a phone call about the fire and fled to the roof. All, but one of the deaths were on the 9th floor, who weren't warned as the phone line to that floor didn't work, so by the time they discovered the fire it had consumed the main stairwell which was the only safe and consistent way out, as the other exits were locked, the fire escape was faulty, and the elevator eventually failed from the heat. Even with all the flaws, something as simple as someone getting a phone call off to the 9th floor or even someone from one of the other two floors running to warn them could have saved lives, as prior to the stairwell being blocked they could have fled either down or if that became blocked upwards to the roof.
Flouting the rules, not flaunting: although the words sound similar they have very different meanings. We all make mistakes, but if we know we can prevent them happening in future. Thank you for the interesting programmes.
This one has given me the jibbly-jibblies ever since I first learned about it. I do not want to think about the nightmare those poor women went through.
Want to see more industrial disasters like this let me know of any suggestions below!
I'd be interested in seeing more mini-docs on building/engineering disasters.
The General Slocum disaster. Largest death count in NYC until 9-11.
The Cleveland East Ohio Gas Explosion in 1944!
Collinwood school fire
You could do the Hurricane Rita Houston evacuation.
...It was a titanic 💩 show, and quite possibly the world's largest traffic jam. Yes, people died.
(It was a month after Katrina, so I think the poor government response in New Orleans had a lot of us spooked.)
This is what people mean when they say that safety regulations are written in blood. Rest in peace all the poor souls who died that day or who survived but were mentally scarred for the rest of their lives.
It is absolutely mind boggling that the owners were acquitted, continued the same practices that lead to the disaster, were caught twice more at least, but nobody ever reopened the case to actually punish them besides taking some "pocket change"
@@kumaahito3927 Unfortunately not especially surprising in that culture.
@@foo219 This is still going on in the garment industry today. Just in different countries.
@@kumaahito3927 It's actually run of the mill ordinary thing. Rich people have more political power, and political power can and will distort justice. Exactly as happened here. I'm sure the businessmen had political connections too, which probably distorted things even further. This is how human societies in general function. Do not expect justice. Political power is the only real arbiter of who gets punished and who gets to walk free from even the worst crimes.
@@Niskirin i know, I've put it badly. Still sad tho
this disaster always horrifies me. any fire where the exits are locked or obstructed will take so many lives if there’s no other means of egress.
Its very horrific
@@PlainlyDifficult yeah. the station nightclub fire is another example that destroys me. learning about these incidents did make me a more vigilant person at least, because now i always check where all the exits near me are in a building i’m in.
or the amount of children working
@@johngaughan9399 exactly why the capture of our regulatory agencies by big business is so harmful. There could be bigger disasters headed our way.
@@ExperimentIV Do yourselves a favor and do not watch that video.
It was pretty amazing how NYU students from the building next-door managed to save several people by extending a ladder between the windows for workers to crawl over.
That happened at the Iroquois Theater Fire in Chicago as well; students from Northwestern University managed to bridge Couch Place and rescued several people before the plank bridge gave way.
It's worth noting that similar incidents are still happening in the textile industry. Another great disaster to look at is the Dhaka garment factory collapse. Once I started reading about current conditions in most garment factories, I stopped buying fast fashion and instead focused on buying quality, ethically made clothing or thrifting clothes. (I also understand that this isn't a clear cut issue and many people can only afford fast fashion clothing, which delves more into how horribly people in general are paid.)
The youtuber Brick Immortar has a great video on that disaster. I bet most people who sub to this channel will enjoy that content as well.
@@daminox Agreed!
The Rana Plaza collapse was one of the most disgraceful, disgusting things to befall workers in the modern age - what shocks but doesn't surprise me is that even high value goods involve the abuse of the poor in some unseen area of the world. Luxury teas in the UK still come from pickers that aren't given a bare minimum of PPE to protect from pesticides (for very little cost!). Foxconn is a good read if your not feeling miserable enough😬
Good for you I admire that
I agree mostly, but Im a broke student and I dont wear any fast fashion. It aint cheap at all.
I got myself some Levis for 20-30$ a piece back in 2008 (!) and I still wear them. I got a few more last year, but thats it. If you wear clothes until they are no longer wearable, quality is 100x cheaper than Shein or other fast fashion sh*t.
Ayyyy, nice to see another video. Feels weird to be so happy to see a notification that just means I'll learn about people dying due to (usually) someone else's negligence.
It is a strange feeling
@@PlainlyDifficult yeah and also this video is pretty interesting cause here in the u.s. I learned about this topic in english class of all places and some of the stories written about inside point of view by the survivors is incredible
Don't look at it that way. The more we know about the history the better. When I was in architecture school we had to learn about egress. They used the Club/Studio Fire disaster as an example of bad design and how another fire 50 years prior changed law to have a 1 hour fire wall between building units. The studio/club fire was the worst for me. People got trampled and it was one door because they locked the others. No sprinkler system and the fire killed alot of people in a small space. I will always remember it and ever since I can always point out 2 or more exits in a building.
Even parking lots to big shopping centers have a minimum of 2 exits to the parking lot. When traffic is heavy at the lights and entrances I circle around behind the building where delivery trucks go and find the back up exits 18 wheelers take. It saves time and makes things quick during the holidays. This Christmas I was leaving walmart and no one and I mean no one was on the back exits. The 2 eentrance/exits at the front with lights had about 60 cars each trying to leave. I circled around and stopped for 3 seconds at the stop sign and I was on the main road. Beat all the traffic. Said that to say I see building entrances and exits difference. I look for the best and least travel way to exit due to panic and people rushing for main exits.
@@cmasterson "...walmart" Ignoring how you pay up front, then move through to the back, pass through the Employees-Only stock area and leave, Walmart products are made in overseas factories like this one.
With the failures of those who were in charge of many of these places leading to disaster, it stands to reason these videos will be the only way we learn how to not do it again. In a kind of dark irony, these vids save lives.
But most importantly we get the weekly weather report in London U.K.
If you visit any store in America now you might notice a sign or letters above the doors of a business that say “this door to remain unlocked during business hours” and I believe the triangle fire was the reason for that legislation
Never knew that was the reason!
I never knew that either!
Yeah every business with a certain amount of allowance for occupancy has to have a certain amount of usable exits during operation for situations like this.
It really came into play when I did my Fire Code training in Fire Academy. It was important for us to know how many exits to expect, roughly, and their general placements.
People would get mad if their building wasn't up to code like it's our fault somehow. All I could think was "if a fire ever broke out here, your ass would be grass and OSHA is gonna have the weed whacker"
It's ridiculous how little some people care about basic fire safety.
Also why doors in businesses are required to open out among many other requirements.
Probably a few other disasters that motivated such laws. Such as the Iroquois Theatre Fire
I’ve been fascinated by this disaster ever since I attended NYU and realized (from the plaque on the building) that I was attending class in the very building in which it took place. Thanks for giving it your trademark compassionate, yet matter-of-fact treatment!
Oh wow. So did NYU buy the lot the land was on, knock down the old building, and then build their own in its place, or did they literally just renovate the old Shirtwaist factory building?
It's always strange when a building has an old, dark history like that.
@@mcnultyssobercompanion6372 It's still the same building!! Triangle owned the 8-10th floors, and after everything was fixed after the fire, NYU bought the 8th floor in 1916. NYU later bought the whole building
@@mcnultyssobercompanion6372 The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which doesn't provide any actual legal protection, but does mean there would probably be a lengthy court battle waged by preservationists if any owner tried to demolish it.
@@mcnultyssobercompanion6372 The building was, indeed, fireproof. Unfortunately, everything else *in* the building was not. NYU has owned land around Washington Square Park since right after it was founded in the 1830s-indeed, some NYU Law students attending a Saturday study session next door rescued some of the fire victims by stretching some ladders across the gap between the roofs of the buildings.
The Ash Building is still standing and in use. It’s owned by NYU. The top three floors are cut up into laboratory spaces. That’s what “fireproof” meant then: building would suffer no structural damage and could be put back in use as soon as the wreckage and bodies were cleared out.
That is great that the buildings were made they way, as they should be made safely and fireproof construction also often contains the fire so that it doesn't spread to the next building and the next.
What is not ok is using that excuse to think "Oh these workers I exploit and abuse will be just fine locked in for the workday so that they don't steal a fabric scrap to patch up their child's school outfit or just as bad, take a break! The buildings fireproof so why should I worry about a fire?" Evil, evil and greedy...
As a former Forensic Architecture Technician, part of our duty was check for trip hazards & fire safety. One of the most common problems were stairwells in high rise bldngs not having adequate size/layout, and inconsistency of stairs. X amount of people are supposed to be able to dump out of a building in X time. Step /tread/height tolerance has to be within 1/16” of each other (can’t remember the exact number) but even being an 1/8” off from one step to another can subconsciously mess you up and you can trip. Slopes of stairs have to be within a certain range too.- if too steep, people are more likely to fall. Too shallow and it slows people down too much. The last thing is the size of the landings, exit door, and door swing. Landings have to allow for clumps of people to gather and get out. We developed a tool called the stairometer( I wish we patented it) -we would lock down the profile in a template of the staircase per the arch plans or per the building code at the time of construction. We would lay it on every step and measure how far off if any the stair was out of spec. I learned a lot on that job!
That is amazing, thank you for sharing. I never knew there were Forensic Architecture Techs, but now that I do, I think it would be a fascinating job.
The step measurement thing explains a few things in my life involving old buildings and haunted/curses stairs.
And all of the facts are just cool in general.
This reminds me of a video someone made about some random step on a staircase up from a subway station in NYC, if I remember correctly. The step was not visually perceivable as different, but this person had measured the discrepancy compared to the others, and recorded a compilation of people tripping on that EXACT step! I don't have any source for this, just a vague memory of video I watched years ago.
(I recognize the importance) But imagine having to renovate stairwell cause 1 step is 1/8” too shallow lol
@@TheMechanic554 add a riser of 1/8 of an inch to the other stairs. May have to replace some carpet, if the stairwell had any, but definitely easier than complete reno.
another bad thing with these sewing factories were the wooden floors were soaked with oil from the sewing machines, the fuzz from the material, and other things from the handing and processing of clothing items. i worked in many sewing factories doing electrical work in the city i live in, reading, Pa. we used to be a big area for sewing factories. and we had some that caught fire and man did they go up fast and burn down in no time. and i can tell you crawling around those places the layers of dust, fuzz, oily goop that was left behind in the crawl spaces and up in the beams
I swear... When you first get started with any kind of powered equipment for fabric or textiles, like a sewing machine or automatic knitter, it's ASTOUNDING how much fuzzy, dusty, crap they seem to magically attract!!!
You get your first sewing machine, be it a "normal" or a "surger" and you learn that intricate clean-out procedure from the manual... AND then a new one from the technician to help you clean, oil, and maintain on your own between visits... AND then EVERY single time you turn your head there's something else catching lint... some place else where something's dragging... and you're getting inventive with an air-compressor because you just can't afford keyboard cleaner anymore...
I honestly don't know how they'd handle it in the sewing factories... I'd be out of my mind in a week! ;o)
Like being built of fatwood 😔
I remember back in highschool I was assigned to do a project explaining the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. It made me anxious about going in buildings that could have potential fire hazards in them for about a year. Truly an awful situation where the main culprit was corporate greed wanting to minimize costs and maximize profits, no matter the cost of human lives.
Corporate greed never seems to change.
The avarice, greed and disregard for human life is a feature, not a bug, as they say.
If its corporate its always greedy. Corpos are devoid of humanity and would burn you and your family alive to make a buck. This is why we need more regulation with teeth and lengthy jail times.
I first learned about it when I saw a movie about it on TV when I was a kid.
Read up on the Imperial Food Products plant in Hamlet, North Carolina. Faulty sprinklers and exits chained shut led to twenty-five deaths eighty years after the triangle fire.
There's a beautiful, heart-twistingly realistic book I read as a kid. It's a historical fiction novel iirc, called "Ashes of Roses" by M.J. Auch. It focused on both the brutal treatment faced by many Irish immigrants entering from Ellis Island during the early 1900s, and more specifically, it presents this exact disaster and the people it affected. The whole book is completely thrilling from cover to cover.
What country is that in your pfp?
@@god.mp4 I think it might be France
Nah, interesting guess though! It's a Pan pride flag. 😅
@@Warbugzz don’t tell me you thought they were serious
@@fever4174 of course not! 🤣 but hey, if they're going to behave like knuckleheads in the comment section of a education-based TH-cam channel, let them. I'm not the one that looks ridiculous!
(Well, perhaps I do look a bit ridiculous. The pan flag has always been fairly bright and gaudy, buuut it also draws the eye, so... 😅)
I live in New England in a relatively small town. I volunteer for my local fire department and we have a regional Fire Academy. This specific incident is still studied today. Several obvious things are covered: don't lock escape routes, have plenty of fire extinguishers, etc. One thing that is obvious but might not seem it from an abstract view is DO NOT BUILD HIGHER THAN YOUR TALLEST LADDER.
Grenfell tower is a case in point. Although after that disaster, some bright spark wanted to build a 51 storey residential block of flats not far away from where that occured. But only wanted 1 set of staircases in order to maximise profits.
Yeah that nearly got the go ahead if it wasn't for The Guardian (a UK newspaper) finding out and splashing it all over their front pages.
I first heard about this story from my grandfather, who was both the Deputy Chief of our local fire department, and also a self-taught tailor. Because I loved his stories, I knew right away when he described the building what was going to happen...
@@neuralmute this is literally all I know of your grandfather and I'm sure I would love his stories too!
Local boards of commissioners must hold development to safety of available resources. Really good to get to know your local govt, Sheriff, Fire Dept!
Yep, my town is getting a new industrial site, and in turn our department is getting a brand new 107’ Pierce Ascender.
I remember reading about this in a firefighter book when I was in 5th grade. What I remember the most is the pictures in the book of the worker’s bodies on the sidewalk after jumping
Its pretty gruesome!
They showed you pictures of dead bodies in 5th grade?
@@sparrow166 america
@@sparrow166 Life isn't all peaches and rainbows, but the fifth grade might be a little bit too soon to learn such a thing.
@@sparrow166 I don’t necessarily think the book was meant for 5th graders but I read it in 5th grade. I actually have that very book in my room to this day
I am in construction here in NYC.. I've worked on projects at NYU which is directly across the street and every time I see this building I get chills after learning about this catastrophe in school as a kid...
It's still there?! Wow, I'd have thought it would've been demolished a long time ago.
@@RCAvhstape Nope it's still around. My dad did electrical work in the building a few years back. He mention about how eerie it is inside
Mike, I'm looking to get away from where I am currently, as I'm just not happy. Could you point me in the right direction to get a job in NYC? I love the city, especially being from the sticks of nowhere.
A truly horrific and tragic disaster, with an infuriating aftermath to boot. I work in textiles myself, and in this day and age it can be easy to forget that someone had to fight for these working conditions. I hope the lives that were lost this day found their peace
I'd love to see you do a video on Our Lady of the Angels school fire. That tragedy struck everyone in the area. Even my father who was a child at the time lost a cousin to the blaze.
Thanks for the suggestion
@@PlainlyDifficult I second the Our Lady of the Angels fire as a great topic.
Here in Mexico the same happened on the 1985 quake, a lot of textile workers died because their building catches fire and all doors were locked from outside with a big chain, my grandma worked nearby and saw much of what happened.
That’s terrible. Why would anyone lock workers in like that !
There was an even worse fire in NYC just seven years before the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, onboard the steamboat General Slocum. 1021 people died, mostly women and children going on a day trip. There were abysmal safety standards on the boat: for example, the life jackets hadn’t been replaced in thirteen years and instead of keeping people afloat, they absorbed water and dragged their wearers down.
Oh my God! That’s my biggest fear! 😭
Also, the fire hoses on board were dry rotted and the life boats were either chained or bolted down - I don't remember which - effectively making them decorations.
Any time an industry is allowed to self regulate, this is the outcome. Safety regulations are written in blood, and labor laws are no different. The fact that so many people are so vocal about wanting to loosen up regulations that are there to keep them from becoming a statistic is beyond any level of reason.
My grandfather was a fireman. He was a little kid when the Triangle fire happened, but he always remberd it. That and the 1954 Cleavland school fire really made him be concerned about fire safety
The Cleavland hill school fire took place in Buffalo, NY, the next city over from him
this one was especially disturbing and triggering, owners didn't get any real punishment and it's pretty much how the system still works when it comes to the rich
Sadly true
That’s why we’ve got to hunt down people that get away with atrocities
Vigilante justice is acceptable when the avenues of normal justice fail entirely.
If the penalty for violating safety regulations is less than the cost of following the regulations, the company owners won't even pretend to care about workers' safety.
'Murica.
@@Geoff69420 Or just about any country now.
Thank you for not delving and for presenting at the speed of ADHD. It's so much easier to stay focused and get the basics of an event in this format
I have been waiting for this one for a long time. I was so excited to see the thumbnail today...
This is the earliest I have been.
Thank you!
This tragedy has a special hold on me as it helped me win a speech competition in junior high and I was given the topic "catastrophes".
If I remember correctly the doors opened in to the rooms, not outwards. So even if the doors were unlocked, panicked people mobbing to the doors would make them quite difficult to open. This is why doors open outwards (path of exit)
That was the Cocoanut Grove fire, where the doors opened inward instead of outward.
I do love the weather updates from your corner of London at the end. gets a chuckle out of me every time
Excellent summary of this horrible event. Fabric scraps and textile dust fed the initial fire, but the heavy wooden floors turned it into a raging inferno. For years, oil from the machinery had soaked into the wood. Once the floors began to burn, the oil acted as an accelerant to make this hell even more hellish.
I had read about this tragedy before, but I never realized that the owners kept up their bad practices after the fire. I am at a loss for words. That is a combination of greed and stupidity that boggles the mind.
I imagine the dead and their families would have appreciated your referring to the event as a industrial disaster rather than an industrial accident. The only efforts to preserve the lives of the workers were those that could be sloughed off to the women themselves - the restriction on smoking.
I read a book as a kid about the lives of a few (real) women who were caught and died in the fire. It was genuinely one of the most terrifying and horrible things I’d ever read- it included the graphic ways in which workers died, I could hardly believe it was real and how cruel it all was. Brutal but effective introduction to worker’s rights as a child.
This is interesting. It also reminds me of what my history teacher would do. He would open and close the door and ask what was important about it. He would then talk about that the reason the door opened outwards was because in the day doors opened in ward and in factories if there was a fire people would run to the door to escape. Since they were all piling on a door that opened inward no one could open the door. People would die from being trampled on and trapped to be consumed by the fire. He would always use this example when ever we talked about the industrial revolution and when he tried to explain why studying history is important. That even the tiniest things such as a way we open doors is important
Ive got a Good subject to think about. Its not about Dams but about a chemical dissaster in the netherlands. Its called: the fire at the Moerdijk at the 5th of january 2011. It is a chemical prossesion plant that caught fire and almost troched a square kilometer on fire.
Thanks for the suggestion!
Good one. also totally preventable and the result of not enforcing the rules.
Somehow the profit of private company's is more important than public safety, and not destroying the environment.
My only complaint with this video is as an American I think the historical ranking of 8 is wrong; it should be a 10. This is a before triangle/after triangle inflection moment in the US in regards to workers rights, occupational health and safety legislation, labor union growth, fire codes, generalized building codes, the publics views on immigrants as people, etc. To this day it has a not insignificant amount of space devoted to it in our high school history books.
If you think a fire in one building most people have never even heard about deserves a historical 10 you've never heard of real 10s like the Great Chicago fire or even worse the Iroquois Theater fire.
@@vertyisprobablydead Going to have to disagree with you. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire is something that's taught in a lot of schools here in the U.S.
@@thaliabirrueta8456 no it's not. Here in the US.
I’d give it a 10 on the Legacy because of Frances Perkins. If you don’t know who she is and her connection to the tragic event, you need to look her up. The TSW fire and FP changed American History and US Labor Laws forever.
Additionally, the movie Dirty Dancing pays homage to FP, the first woman in the Cabinet…Baby’s real name was Frances.
@@vertyisprobablydead while not discounting the human cost of the two fires you mentioned, they did not influence US labor standards the way Triangle did. given that most if not all US labor safety laws can be linked in one way or another to this one fire - given that it was the first to get the political momentum needed to start the conversation - it deserves a 10. OSHA exists today because of this fire
Climate Town mentioned this in his fast fashion video, it's just so depressing that they got caught locking the doors AGAIN. Shows just how important labour laws and workers' rights are.
I always look forward to your uploads. Thank you 😊
Thank you for watching!
I remember learning about this way back in middle school. It wasn't until years later when I realized the absolute severity of lack of safety standards through out the industrial age between the 1700's to even today. We can joke about how OSHA is always up someone ass about something that isn't up to standard, but after witnessing injuries that fully could have been avoided, you start to realize that OSHA is absolute bare minimum in safety procedures. It's unfortunate that in order to actually start following safety procedures, people have to die first. Even after people die, it's up to companies to decide whether they'll spend the $5k out of the millions they make to do safety training. Common sense starts with the individual, but gets you fired by the company who tells you to disregard safety for profit.
thank you for the amazing content and a deep dive in history. every video you make is hard, dark but needed. keep up the great work
Glad you like them!
Im diagnosed with OCD and I want to thank you for the fundraiser. It’s difficult to live with and difficult to talk about because of how stigmatized it is
I know the feeling! Thank you for your comment
I got a chapter of this in Jr.High schooling but it focused on ... other things.. Like the machinery the workers used and the locked emergency exits and the kinds of things they made with the machinery and the prices of their materials but not much else.--
Knowing how your channel handles things though, I'm excited for your more 'study the blackbox' approach :D
I really like watching your videos! I hope you have some sunny and warm days ahead!
Thank you! You too!
Finally! I've been waiting for this one!
I hope you found the video informative!
Sadly this is still a thing in parts of the world. 2012 Dhaka garment factory is a case in point. Locked doors, poor working conditions, insane hours, low paid, mostly young females and children. The 2021 fires in Pakistan (Lahore and Karachi ) with similar conditions and insane death tolls. There was even one in 2021 (Rupganj, Bangladesh) - although it was a juice factory, not a garment one - no fire exits, illegal building etc
As long as people want money over lives, these things will continue to happen.
And the saddest thing is that , they will always win , profits over lives will always go on since well .
It's good to be rich
I'm a big fan of your channel, especially radiological disasters/incidents.
This was a great video!
Thanks, truly horrifying, sadly locked fire escapes persisted for many more years.
I had no knowledge of this disaster, but,I do now.
This is still going on in Kentucky with the workers who couldn’t leave at he Amazon warehouse during the Tornado
Thats why I don't use amazon!
Same here
Actually the correct procedure in a tornado is to find an interior space with no windows and ideally several walls between the outside and you on the lowest level possible. A basement is best. You do not go outside in a tornado if at all possible except to go into an underground storm shelter. There is too much flying debris that can spear and kill you. Failing an interior, move as far away from the exterior walls as possible. Also, get as low as possible so any flying debris hopefully will not hit you. I have on the edges of a few tornados and they more dangerous than many who have never been around them realize.
The only correction was the Amazon plant was a few hours away from me, in Edwardsville, Illinois. The Kentucky facility was a candle facility in Mayfield, Kentucky. Edwardsville was hit around 9pm I believe. The National Weather Service put all of southern Illinois under a severe thunderstorm and tornado watch around 5pm. The tornado warning I believe was issued around 10 minutes before it hit the facility. (I have friends that attend SIUE and family from there, this is what they had told me.)
Severe thunderstorms are rare for this area in winter. And with the change in temperatures we had that day, plus the added danger of a nighttime storm - it was a recipe for disaster. We had known for at least 3 days prior that this storm would be horrific and it could produce horrifying storms. These businesses had time to prepare. They had time to run a safety drill and show people where the interior safe spaces were/time for workers to know if they felt safe working during a projected severe storm. (Also, Amazon workers said that they were not allowed phones on themselves, but some kept their phones on them in case of the worst. Amazon has claimed this is false, but I believe the workers.) I know several places in my hometown that closed early because they did not want their employees to drive through the the horrific winds. We somehow managed to miss the worst of it, but nearly everywhere around us got hit with tornado warnings or hail. I believe all of southern Illinois - where I am from and where Edwardsville is located - was put under a watch starting at 5pm. We had several days of forewarning for how bad the storm could be PLUS several hours under a tornado watch/severe storm watch. I see a lot of people in my area be complacent about tornadoes. "It hasn't happened here, so it can't happen here." And I think that is what the Amazon warehouse was thinking, so management put Christmas Rush profits over the safety of their workers. Since it "can't happen here."
I apologize for length, but as someone who saw just how bad the storm was and knew for just how much prep we had for a severe storm - it angers me at how little Amazon cared. How it seemed like they had no sturdy storm shelter, despite Edwardsville being on the edge of tornado alley. (And those exterior walls did not look like they were made to withstand high winds.) Employees should not have been in that building when the storm hit. And they had several hours under a tornado watch to prepare for the worst, as they were projected to be hit by a horrible cell.
but they did nothing and allowed the next shift to come in and work.
I could understand why you wouldn't want to cover the December 10th storm, as it is still so soon and there are still so many unknowns. (On top of there being so many different tornadoes.) But I would highly suggest covering it at some point. It was such a horrible and rare winter thunderstorm. And so many people were either injured or killed because they put profit over lives.
@@washingtonradio the warehouse had a storm shelter but they were either told too late to get there in time (Amazon warehouses are massive and tornadoes travel at 100mph), or weren't told at all
I learned about this event from watching Warehouse 13. A doorknob from the factory was imbued with the fire from the event and would burn anyone that touched it.
I remember that show! I kinda liked it and need to see if it's back on one of our free to air channels.
I remember learning about this in middle school (grade 7 more specifically). We focused on the effects this situation had on regulations for buildings and played into more worker rights stuff.
Stuff I remember is about how the factory basically had implemented a check in out system with the doors, and made them less fitable. Doors swung inside the room. This caused huge issues in the stairways, people couldn’t open the door because the panic just had many people just trying to get out by going towards the excit. When the fire had gotten so bad a number jumped from windows before the firemen had arrived with catching tarps. And even when they did most if not all that attempted jumping down did not make the fall.
Also remember how the lower floor was the floor with the men on it and one likely being the one who unconsciously threw the cigarette butt into the scrap waist bin. And most the main facts included in the lovely video.
It’s Truely a harrowing tragedy that although verry preventable did help with adding needed regulations.
It may be obscure to much of the rest of the world, but this disaster is still so epochal in the US that it's mentioned in, of all things, an episode of the web series _Freeman's Mind_ (a comedic narration of gameplay from _Half-Life,_ you can find it here on TH-cam). Freeman rants about it after running into a dead end at a locked door that looks like it should be an emergency exit.
My great uncle was Senator Robert Wagner D ,NY passed alot of laws to prevent this happening again ...
Horrible.
Nothing changes, workers are still seen as a commodity and are abused by employers. It's why workers rights are so important, if you don't have them your employer will provide only the bare minumum.
Great video as always.
It would be interesting to see your take on the Hartford circus fire.
Great suggestion!
@@PlainlyDifficult absolutely, would be interested to see your take on that!
Oh I remember this story, I also remember that the doors were locked were keep workers isolated to prevent any outside parties to come in and try to unionize workers.
Tragic that life is cheap and still is.
The Triangle Shirtwaist case is one of the primary civil law (ie. non-criminal) cases we studied at law school. It’s really fundamental to our current work environments here in North America.
Thank you my friend.. for your educational and historical information
This building was no more than 5 blocks from where I grew up on 5th avenue and 10th street. The building seems to have been right on washington square park, where I spent my childhood. When I heard of this story i always thought it was in the lower east side where a lot of garment sweat shops were. As always, you produce awesome content.
My wife and I try to report to the local fire marshal safety hazards like blocked doors, and they just yawn at us. When you go grocery shopping, notice how often the doors are partially blocked with piles of goods for sale. Those plies will make the building harder to evacuate in an emergency because they usually make the breakaway fire exits more difficult or even impossible to open, or at best leave narrower spaces through which to escape. I wonder when we will get another catastrophe.
I love your sign off. I always listen for the London weather update. ;)
Ugh. It's just nightmare fuel. I can't think of many worse ways to die in a collective setting. It's just horrific. I can only imagine witnessing this unfold from the outside, just realizing that you're about to witness these workers realize there's no hope for them.
The results of this also pushed alot of fire safety regulations throughout the united states. That are still relevant to this day.
Very much so
I'd never considered arson. It was horrible enough how negligent the place was 🤔
Its definitely a possibly worth mentioning!
@@PlainlyDifficult I had never heard the arson angle before, but also...
Yeah, that does seem like the kind of crap the people who ran that company would get up to
My dad worked in the building a few years back and he mentioned on how eerie it is inside the place. He's convince the place is haunted
Hey, as someone who used to test between "Severe" and "Extreme" on the Yale-Brown scale for OCD and greatly benefitted from (EXPENSIVE AND INTENSIVE) combined CBT and ERP therapies, I think it's really cool that your channel is promoting an OCD charity. I did not know what I had for *years*, and in that time, my syndrome grew exponentially worse as it was left untreated and exacerbated by my ineffective coping mechanisms. It's one of the few mental illnesses where outcomes can be significantly improved upon with professional intervention yet, some 10 years after my treatment, I notice that most medical professionals -- and even some mental health professionals -- still have absolutely no idea how to handle it. It needs more public attention.
Sidenote for OCD-sufferers reading this: OCD can be trained into you through systematic psychological abuse during development. Your compulsions do not have to be externalized; that is, your compulsions might just be internalized self-reassurances, or you might even have a near-total absence of compulsions. The intervention has some pretty impressive success rates, particularly in comparison to other diagnoses, but I will not lie to you: Things will get worse (during treatment) before they get better (after treatment). You will want to quit the interventions; in fact, you will HATE the interventions... But truly, at least for me, they saved my life. I improved further over the course of the years following therapy because I maintained my progress through concentrated effort, and overall, it "re-wired" me into not having such a profound anxiety response to intrusive thoughts. When the anxiety surrounding the thoughts diminishes, the thoughts themselves become less frequent and less debilitating. People generally find that they improve even more after therapy than they did during the treatment.
This story highlights the importance of unions in the constant never-ending battle for worker's rights. We would still be working in conditions like these and worse in nearly all industries today if not for the brave union members sticking together to fight for better lives for everyone.
I got my first factory job as a 16 year old in Toronto in the late 1990s, and compared to now, the equipment we used was from the 50s and 60s, and incredibly dangerous, with a complete lack of any basic safety features, guards, or things to block you from losing hands or fingers.
In the early 2000s they upgraded things, and never looked back - it's really weird to think that just 30 years ago things weren't anywhere near as safe as today, it's a lot more recent than you'd ever know.
At the time, I didn't think it was strange to be a kid running machinery, but now that I'm grown, I wonder why that was ever allowed - if you get injured at such a young age, you destroy the rest of your life -- before it even began. Weird they used to hire high school students, and weird our parents made us work like that.
Another brilliant channel👍🏻🇬🇧
Reminds me a lot of the Stardust Tragedy in Dublin in the 1980s. A nightclub with fire escapes, but they were all chained up. The building caught fire and many inside perished.
aah! i did a school project on this in 6th grade i even made a little building with the faults pointed out good work!
Makes me wonder why the owners houses didn't mysteriously catch fire with all the exits blocked by chains.
First learned about this from the Ralph Bakshi film American Pop. This is a truly heartbreaking part of history that has been mostly forgotten today. Thank you for this video!
Thank you John, really enjoy the show.
Glad you enjoyed it
I'm crying. I just realized that even though I get early access I never use it because I'm so used to his normal upload schedule
Whenever someone says to you that "government and regulations ruins business and proper safety measures would be implemented anyway by companies even without oversight" remind them this episode.
I learned about this in the fourth grade in a small school on the west cost. And it still infuriates me to this day. Awesome video still feel you rated it low on your scale’s.
This was part of my school curriculum when I took American history in high school. The school would remove such events from the curriculum. Their reasoning being that young adults don't need to worry about the negligence of companies in the past. Even recent events were removed.
I think the most tragic part was people deciding 8 or 9 stories did not seem very high up and at that point jumping felt like the only option. You may die, but you may get lucky and live, and at that point, you will take any option. The fire did bring about many life safety codes we take for granted to this day but at an awful cost.
I unfortunately took the more grim approach and figured it was a choice of dying quickly by fall, or slowly by fire. That choice if all that seemed to be left seems that death by fall would be more pleasant.
@@D3M3NT3Dstrang3r That's what we were taught in school when we learned about this.
I love your videos so much thank you for all you do!
The legacy of this is actually a 9 or 10: The 1911 Triangle Factory Fire is also the inciting incident that generated the federal law requiring all business doors leading to the exterior or escape avenues to remain unlocked during business hours, and to have said statement clearly posted on the door in question.
I agree it's legacy continues to this day and greatly changed safety building laws in NYC and USA
I worked briefly at a medical center for the garment worker's union. That fire was represented by art on the building. It should never be forgotten how greed killed those women. At least they lost their business. As a Christian, I can say they may fully regret their actions on the other side if the veil. It was an education on the value of out lives and the unions.
Got yourself another sub 👍
Been enjoying your vids for a while.
It never gets easier to here this one. I've been taught about it a couple times in school and watched a video or two on it. It's always heart breaking.
I learned about this a few months ago in school it’s quite grim……
This story has stuck with me through the decades. It happened on my birthday and it makes me sad. These poor people had to make a decision to burn to death or jump. It was a mini scaled 9/11 in that regards.
I thought I knew this story pretty well but as always I learned something new from PD's take on the subject. Bravo zulu as always!
For the historical legacy scale, I'd say it's 9 from an American perspective. Only because it's one of the few disasters that you can find in grade school history textbooks. Probably second only to the Chicago Fire in widespread knowledge. Speaking of the Chicago fire, would you ever consider a video on the Peshtigo Fire? Way more deadly, but it happened the same night as the Chicago fire, and the news didn't give a crap about rural America.
Thank you for covering this
Another situation where having money bought escape from prosecution. It’s a sad reflection of our legal system back in the day- and today as well. It’s disgusting but folks still escape prosecution like this simply because they are wealthy, influential business people. Thankfully there are laws to help prevent the cruel treatment of workers in the US today.
Very good histories and very good speech. very good channel.
The worst part is that after getting away with it he did it again with his next building locking the exit doors and such
This is a common occurance in Bangladesh today.
Sadly true!
Great video !!!
Thanks for the visit
Always love it when the people responsible for something this terrible normally gets released from all responsibility. Ah America, you are free to die in a fire while also being free from blame if you caused that fire.
I remember learning about this in 7th grade, it was horrifying. I was fascinated to learn about the safety precautions that came of it though.
The sad thing is, as dangerous and inherently unsafe as the factory was, people almost made it out. Cloth doesn't burn especially toxic so there was time to escape, almost everyone on the 8th floor(1 of 3 of the Factory owned section) where the fire started escaped(only one death), mostly by the standard staircase. Everyone on the 10th floor where the offices were located also survived as they got a phone call about the fire and fled to the roof. All, but one of the deaths were on the 9th floor, who weren't warned as the phone line to that floor didn't work, so by the time they discovered the fire it had consumed the main stairwell which was the only safe and consistent way out, as the other exits were locked, the fire escape was faulty, and the elevator eventually failed from the heat.
Even with all the flaws, something as simple as someone getting a phone call off to the 9th floor or even someone from one of the other two floors running to warn them could have saved lives, as prior to the stairwell being blocked they could have fled either down or if that became blocked upwards to the roof.
Very good job!
I learned items which I hadn’t known about this avoidable horrid and unforgivably tragic act of callousness!
Flouting the rules, not flaunting: although the words sound similar they have very different meanings. We all make mistakes, but if we know we can prevent them happening in future. Thank you for the interesting programmes.
This one has given me the jibbly-jibblies ever since I first learned about it. I do not want to think about the nightmare those poor women went through.
Unfortunately quite ironic that what went up in flames was the As(c)h building
Asches to ashes!
The owners were a bunch of As(ch) holes.